Myth of the Great American Prizefight

Boxing once was a thing of gloriously brutal beautal. Two guys would enter the ring, and one guy would emerge a winner. No one won tonight’s bout between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao except perhaps their bank accounts.

Prize fights are BIG business. Truckloads of money changed hands for this fight. But was it worth it? No. No it wasn’t.

The crowd was a who’s who of celebrity boxing enthusiasts. Twitter nearly exploded from the hype. And it was all for nothing. Floyd Mayweather Jr. “won” a statistical victory. He won a financial victory. But boxing still loses.

It was a lame fight. It was boring in every respect. It was exactly what we have all deep down in our hearts come to expect from the world of pugilism. Long gone are the days of Ali’s “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” and George Foreman’s telephone-pole jabs. I’d even take bat crap crazy Mike Tyson over this stuff. Now we have Mayweather. A guy who hits his wife more than his opponent and hugs his opponent more than his wife.

In the build up and hype it was hailed as the “fight of the century” and with a delivery like that it could very well be the final swansong in a long list of over-hyped under-delivered fight cards. It could be the last big fight of the century. A prizefight did indeed take place tonight, but it was not much of a prize, or a fight. It certainly wasn’t great.